Matt Roper appeared on the Informed Saints podcast recently.
I incorporated his suggestions and released a second edition of that book, which is available here:
https://www.amazon.com/Lost-City-Zarahemla-Guatemala-Again/dp/1515337995
You can download a preview on Kindle here:
https://www.amazon.com/Lost-City-Zarahemla-Jonathan-Neville-ebook/dp/B015O4QLSG
I wrote that book because I was interested in the origin of the Mesoamerican/Two-Cumorahs theory (M2C), and everyone told me it started because of these articles in the 1842 Times and Seasons that were attributed to Joseph Smith.
The first obvious point is that even if Joseph wrote these articles, they are clearly speculative, unlike the New York Cumorah/Ramah which was declared a fact in the Times and Seasons itself both before and after these Mesoamerican articles. The hemispheric model advocated by some early LDS was an attempt to reconcile the known site of Cumorah in New York with speculation about sites in South and Central America, a distinction that was always clear at the time, as we can see in Orson Pratt's footnotes in the 1879 Book of Mormon.
It is bizarre to see the M2Cers continue to conflate these two separate issues when the distinction between fact and speculation has always been well established. Now even the Stick of Joseph podcast has joined the anti-Cowdery crowd of M2Cers (and B2Cers).
At any rate, the second obvious point is that Joseph did not write the articles anyway, and they contradicted what he did write in the Wentworth letter, published just a few months before these Mesoamerican articles.
The articles themselves were anonymous, signed by "Ed." meaning "Editor." People attributed them to Joseph because he was listed as the Editor, but as I showed in the book, he was merely the nominal editor (editor in name only), just as he was the nominal printer. The boilerplate at the end of the Times and Seasons says:
"The Times and Seasons, Is edited, printed and published about the first and fifteenth of every month, on the corner of Water and Bain Streets, Nauvoo, Hancock, County, Illinois, by JOSEPH SMITH" (Times and Seasons III.18:862 ¶13)
Despite the boilerplate, no one believes Joseph set type and operated the printing press. He was merely the nominal printer. Likewise, there is plenty of evidence that he did not actually edit the paper, including instances when he did not know what was in the paper until after it was printed.
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On Informed Saints, Matt mentioned his use of "stylometry" to show Joseph was the author. I discussed his work several times on this blog, which you can see if you search for "Roper."
For example, here's a discussion of the "stylometry" claim:
https://www.bookofmormoncentralamerica.com/2015/09/jwha-report-roper-and-fields.html
The Meso articles in the Times and Seasons contain about 900 words (apart from the extensive quotations). The only texts we can specifically attribute to Joseph Smith are the brief journal entries and letters collected by the Joseph Smith Papers, here:
https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/site/documents-in-joseph-smiths-handwriting
Everything else was recorded by scribes. Even articles "signed" by Joseph, such as the Wentworth letter in the Times and Seasons, were not completely written by him. The Wentworth letter is mostly copied from an Orson Pratt pamphlet, as discussed here:
https://www.mobom.org/wentworth-orson-pratt
All of this leads to the problem with "stylometry." We have a small corpus to analyze, and few samples of Joseph's own writing (which mostly date to nearly a decade before the T&S articles).
I had thought that Matt would be happy to share the sources he used for his stylometry so his results could be repeated, but so far as I know, he has never done so.
Maybe he will do so now?
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BTW, I had so much material about the Times and Seasons that I ended up writing two additional books on the topic, Brought to Light and The Editors, both available at https://digitalegend.com/
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